Logos And Alogon

This book is a philosophical study of mathematics, pursued by considering and relating two aspects of mathematical thinking and practice, especially in modern mathematics, which, having emerged around 1800, consolidated around 1900 and extends to our own time, while also tracing both aspects to earlier periods, beginning with the ancient Greek mathematics. The first aspect is conceptual, which characterizes mathematics as the invention of and working with concepts, rather than only by its logical nature. The second, Pythagorean, aspect is grounded, first, in the interplay of geometry and algebra in modern mathematics, and secondly, in the epistemologically most radical form of modern mathematics, designated in this study as radical Pythagorean mathematics. This form of mathematics is defined by the role of that which beyond the limits of thought in mathematical thinking, or in ancient Greek terms, used in the book’s title, an alogon in the logos of mathematics. The outcome of this investigation is a new philosophical and historical understanding of the nature of modern mathematics and mathematics in general. The book is addressed to mathematicians, mathematical physicists, and philosophers and historians of mathematics, and graduate students in these fields.

The contemporary theologian Hans Küng has asked if the "death of God," proclaimed by Nietzsche as the event of modernity, was inevitable. Did the empowering of new forms of rationality in Western culture beginning around 1500 lead necessarily to the reduction or privatization of faith? In Dialogues between Faith and Reason, John H. Smith traces a major line in the history of theology and the philosophy of religion down the "slippery slope" of secularization—from Luther and Erasmus, through Idealism, to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary theory such as that of Derrida, Habermas, Vattimo, and Asad. At the same time, Smith points to the persistence of a tradition that grew out of the Reformation and continues in the mostly Protestant philosophical reflection on whether and how faith can be justified by reason. In this accessible and vigorously argued book, Smith posits that faith and reason have long been locked in mutual engagement in which they productively challenge each other as partners in an ongoing "dialogue." Smith is struck by the fact that although in the secularized West the death of God is said to be fundamental to the modern condition, our current post-modernity is often characterized as a "postsecular" time. For Smith, this means not only that we are experiencing a broad-based "return of religion" but also, and more important for his argument, that we are now able to recognize the role of religion within the history of modernity. Emphasizing that, thanks to the logos located "in the beginning," the death of God is part of the inner logic of the Christian tradition, he argues that this same strand of reasoning also ensures that God will always "return" (often in new forms). In Smith's view, rational reflection on God has both undermined and justified faith, while faith has rejected and relied on rational argument. Neither a defense of atheism nor a call to belief, his book explores the long history of their interaction in modern religious and philosophical thought.

The nature of the self is an important point at which philosophy and literature intersect. Text, Body and Indeterminacy acknowledges this connection by forging a link between the philosophical concept of the self and the category of the literary character. The philosophical horizon of Text, Body and Indeterminacy is delineated by the neo-pragmatist debate on selfhood. The book entwines the ideas of Richard Rorty and Richard Shusterman by stressing similarity in their aestheticizing of ethics and by showing the difference in their understanding of the self as textual or bodily. The characters created by Pater and Wilde are freshly assessed within this dual philosophical perspective. Their doppelgängers are seen as the forerunners of postmodernist concepts: the cerebral flâneur is reflected in Rorty’s model “ironist,” and the sensuous aesthete returns through Shusterman’s notion of the somatic self. Text, Body and Indeterminacy establishes how Pater renders his protagonists through discursive patterns—tropes of Decadence, philosophical theorems, and myths—only to subvert these vocabularies and to emphasize the reality of the body, the extra-textual dimension of the self. It also shows how Wilde’s sensuous personae, both bodily and indeterminate, transcend the vocabularies available to the Wildean flâneurs. Through its interpretations, Text Body and Indeterminacy uniquely combines literary portraits by Pater and Wilde, highlights interlocking themes and, in every reading, points to the ethical gains of tilting the idea of selfhood into the somatic realm.

Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher and one of the most original European thinkers of the twentieth century. As a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, he had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. He was Hannah Arendt’s supervisor before her emigration to the United States in the 1930s and himself experienced the consequences of Nazi persecution. He was removed from his position at the University of Heidelberg in 1937, due to his wife being Jewish. Published in 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, The Origin and Goal of History is a vitally important book. It is renowned for Jaspers' theory of an 'Axial Age', running from the 8th to the 3rd century BCE. Jaspers argues that this period witnessed a remarkable flowering of new ways of thinking that appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world, in striking parallel development but without any obvious direct cultural contact between them. Jaspers identifies key thinkers from this age, including Confucius, Buddha, Zarathustra, Homer and Plato, who had a profound influence on the trajectory of future philosophies and religions. For Jaspers, crucially, it is here that we see the flowering of diverse philosophical beliefs such as scepticism, materialism, sophism, nihilism, and debates about good and evil, which taken together demonstrate human beings' shared ability to engage with universal, humanistic questions as opposed to those mired in nationality or authoritarianism. At a deeper level, The Origin and Goal of History provides a crucial philosophical framework for the liberal renewal of German intellectual life after 1945, and indeed of European intellectual life more widely, as a shattered continent attempted to find answers to what had happened in the preceding years. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new Foreword by Christopher Thornhill.

Collects speeches delivered by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger between 1963 and 2004, arranged thematically on the subjects of the creed, the church, Christian faith, and tributes.

What is the nature of economics? How does economics relate to politics? Readers searching for the Ancient Greeks’ answers to these questions often turn to Aristotle, focusing on small portions of the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics that relate to money-making, exchange, and household management. While this approach yields some understanding of economics and politics, it fails to account for how Aristotle’s theoretical inquiry into these practical matters reflects the character of his political philosophy. According to Aristotle, the Ethics and Politics together form “the philosophy concerning the human things.” All human things begin with choice, an intellectual desire and need for the good. Aristotle’s care for this desire is the heart of his political philosophy. Through a close, literal, and careful reading of Aristotle’s political philosophy, readers discover the natural boundaries to economic and political life. Simultaneously theoretical and practical, Aristotle’s political philosophy offers readers a perspective of economics and politics that provides them the experience of the knowledge they need to desire and live within the limit of the good.

Philosophy in the American West explores the physical, ecological, cultural, and narrative environments associated with the western United States, reflecting on the relationship between people and the places that sustain them. The American West has long been recognized as having significance. From Crèvecoeur’s early observations in Letters from an American Farmer (1782), to Thoreau’s reflections in Walden (1854), to twentieth-century thoughts on the legacy of a vanishing frontier, "the West" has played a pivotal role in the American narrative and in the American sense of self. But while the nature of "westernness" has been touched on by historians, sociologists, and, especially, novelists and poets, this collection represents the first attempt to think philosophically about the nature of "the West" and its influence on us. The contributors take up thinkers that have been associated with Continental Philosophy and pair them with writers, poets, and artists of "the West". And while this collection seeks to loosen the cords that tie philosophy to Europe, the traditions of "continental" philosophy—phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and others—offer deep resources for thinking through the particularity of place. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Philosophy, as well as those working in Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities more broadly.